What's better/faster? Try-catch or avoid exception?

Question

I would like to know, what\'s better or/and faster in general programming? Avoid the exception or wait for the exception?

Avoid the exception would be:

Answer 1

Throwing exceptions is an expensive task, so I would always try and validate rather than catch.

This should be easy enough to test, generate some code that throws an exception through each run and test it against a similar set of code that does conditional checking and measure the performance.

If the code is documented with details of which conditions exceptions will be thrown, you should be able to adapt your calling code. Of course you can't handle every scenario (lower level runtime errors perhaps?), so your code should only really try and handle exceptions where it can actually react and possibly continue.

Answer 2

It depends. I almost always try to avoid the exception unless doing so is prohibitively costly.